The Governor of the Northern Province (7 page)

The priest instructed Bokarie to maintain the broken-bottle perimeter against the government and the rebel recruiters, and also to pick assistants. Bokarie chose his two brothers and his cousin, the only other members of his family to have survived a tribal dispute from a few years earlier, as the government in the capital city had called it. (Alas, there was no time for questions at the press briefing that morning, so no one had to account for why one tribe in this particular conflict had air support and machine-gun-turreted Jeeps, while the other had dull machetes and comparatively unsuccessful chicken-bone curses.) In the aftermath, Bokarie and his brothers had been picked up by Father Alvaro on a pass through the village ruins. He had found them, like so many of their contemporaries, wandering through various heaps in search of food, the odd toy, an interesting bauble, their mothers. They were vaguely feral, shut-mouthed about recent events out of mistrust and sheer incomprehension at the things they had seen and heard and been spattered by. They had gone with him into the van out of boredom and belly pang. Their foraging skills were put to use once they'd been acclimated to the orphanage. When they stopped crying out in their sleep and shitting themselves at half-remembered outrages and relived threats.

Bokarie had been good at the bottle-getting game, but he liked this new duty a great deal more than crawling around behind the canteens for discards and beating the gutter brush for empties tossed from the overcrowded pickup trucks. Teamed up with his blood men, as he took to calling his brothers and cousin from then on, Bokarie would often get chased by bartenders and dishwashers smoking their cigarettes, and by truck drivers and ticket touts on piss breaks, and also by the hungrier and more desperate dogs. He was fast enough to get away from these wheezing, barking predators, and just because he could, he would mock them from a little more than near at hand, by slowing down and fancying up some footwork before catching up with the other boys already hauling back to the orphanage.

But with this promotion, he was now allowed to hang back when the other boys were sent out. After a time he would play soccer with his brothers and cousin, but first there was the unwelcome job of breaking apart cow dung and mixing it up with the water left over from the morning washing, to form the paste that held in place the pieces of glass the younger boys returned with. In those years when he ruled the orphanage wall, Bokarie persuaded the others to do the work, though two were bigger and the other older, while he supervised, the dirt-specked soccer ball cradled under one arm like an Eden apple. The dung-and-mud mixing was not only their duty-bound honour to their fellow orphans, Bokarie suggested, but also a way to get a few kicks at the ball. He liked how well he could bend them.

Bokarie also enjoyed the views and sounds that came his way from both sides of the orphanage walls when he was on top, holding himself above and between these two worlds. His presence up there was unprecedented. Before him, boys would smidge and sweat their way across the wall, purse-lipped and vibrating on their haunches as they leaned in to replace a missing piece of glass. Eventually they would shimmy and dangle back down and get a little rubbing alcohol into the pink cracks that had opened up on their arms and legs, and only then boast to the younger ones about snapping fat dung beetles in half with well-placed stabs and about snatched looks at the working girls on their way to the beer bars.

Now the younger boys, upon returning from their raids, gathered and marvelled at Bokarie's ever more daring dances across the top of the wall. They also listened to him. As he grew longer and lankier and cockier still, a few women on the other side started to notice. They would laugh and clap and make loud predictions of his future talents. The drunker ones, on their way to and from work or the odd public hygiene clinic, would even swing their hips in unison with his movements as Bokarie threaded his way along the blocks, darting here and striking there to shove a cracked bottle neck into the trench his blood men had prepared.

From up there, he could see a few cooking fires in what settlements remained after the latest raids. Now and then, he longed to be close by one of them. He could remember one childhood time when someone like a grandmother re-boiling something like sheep bones had given him a palm's worth of the brownish foamy runoff to drink when the others weren't looking. But he stopped himself from remembering like that again. Nothing good could come to him from back there.

But he liked the rest of it, of being so high above the earth, with faces watching him from below, waiting to hear from him. Father Alvaro had encouraged the boys to select a line or two from the Bible as private credos, God's words to them to live by. Bokarie found his in Isaiah.
Thus saith the Lord GOD: Cry out full-throated and unsparingly, lift up your voice like a trumpet blast
. Bokarie did like that from his Hosea passage while stretching his back between glass refittings. He liked how the words bounced and jumped off his tongue, and also that he could make the women below him dance, that he could turn a hip and some would turn theirs. In time there was one girl in particular who started keeping time with him. She had a heavy chest and three friends. She looked riper than the African girls he had come across in those old yellow magazines. Meanwhile, Father Alvaro thought the boy a bit flamboyant in the hips but gifted in the tongue. If he could be made to stay and settle down some, perhaps there was a vocation here.

When Bokarie left the orphanage, he did it by scrambling up and across and down the wall at an opening he had prepared in advance, by sinking some of that week's glass to only a shallow depth. It was not difficult to press the pieces into the still-damp mud and slide across. He had the others go first and smooth out the path, having given effective descriptions of his woman's bouncy friends just waiting with jiggling on the other side. Later their first night out, nervous and aggressive and hungry, they tracked them to one of the beer bars. As rare as it was providential, all were on break. While Bokarie and the girl finally danced up close together, knees and then higher parts knocking and sliding, his brothers and cousin raised up their shirts to the girl's fey friends and plumed for them, arcing their backs to bare the glass specks that had nicked into their skin during their courageous escape from the shark's belly, as they had taken to calling the orphanage. The boys buckled at the waist when their stomachs and points nearby were inspected by the girls' hands, which were nimble and efficient like seamstresses'. Claims of possession, if vaguely conflicting, were quickly and showily established.

It had to be accepted that the girls made what they did for the man who ran the bar by doing and letting have done to them as was required. After being introduced later that first night and assuring the owner that he'd never chased after him before for stealing bottles, Bokarie told Uncle, as he was called, that he and his blood men were looking for any work to be had. They were taken on as bouncers and dishwashers in exchange for a place to sleep and the right to finish any drink left by a man who picked out their girl for a go. They were instructed to keep the red, white and blue iceboxes full of beer and cool with river water. Now and then they thought about the orphanage, even saw a few of the boys around town. Out of guilt and charity and laziness, they would leave empty bottles at the back of the bar's dish hut and turn away when the darting, snatching hands came.

Bokarie soon progressed from dishwasher to whore's tout. Uncle had noticed a surge of interest in Bokarie's girl, Elizabeth, after they had been dancing together on another of her breaks. This, Uncle realized, was a very successful way of advertising particular flexibilities. Uncle had him dance the talent in front of the men who came in each night. Each morning, when the last of the customers had gone off, the girls would limp and laugh over to the river to wash themselves off and the boys would sweep and sponge off the dance floor. Uncle let them sleep and fumble and giggle there together until the first men came in the afternoon from their hangovers, their marching, their surveying, their recruitments, their peacekeeping.

IV.

When Bokarie later returned to the orphanage to liberate its holdings on behalf of the General's National Restitution Campaign, he had men waiting in a nearby and idling truck, which was driven by his cousin. The Bangladeshi quartet lowered their weapons at the sight of so many machine guns and machetes, and Bokarie marched in. Father Alvaro threw holy water in his face while Bokarie finished off a bottle and then broke it over his head. When the current collection of orphans had been assembled in the courtyard, Bokarie pointed at the crack-pate double-bent priest and in the general direction of the Upriver people to the north, the target for the General's National Restitution Campaign. He informed the boys that those were the men responsible for killing their parents and leaving them in this white prison, this shark's belly.

“Like the jaws of highway robbers, they conspire with the priests who murder in the way those that pass out of Sichem: for they have wrought wickedness. And I say to you, my little brothers, suffer an eye for an eye! Make a Father suffer for your fathers!”

Returning outside the orphanage's walls after a few more broken bottles and other such things, Bokarie offered the Bangladeshis certain compensations for maintaining their services. Then the truck chugged and gutted into the orphanage and he had the gate shut after it. The priest's body was wrapped in a bedsheet and left with the rest of the soiled laundry. Bokarie kicked around a soccer ball with the younger boys and added to the force he was leading Upriver for the General, for the nation, for possibilities.

The following year, three U.S. congressmen were empanelled by a special congressional committee to conduct an open, honest, fair and balanced study of the UN's peacekeeping activities in Africa. Among other interests, there were spending cuts to be justified. The troubling actions of the Bangladeshi contingent in the northern province of Atwenty received special attention. The orphanage there was designated non-sectarian and to be guarded as such. But when Bokarie had taken it for the General and the People, the Bangladeshis had maintained their posts and the international community had guarded a child-soldier training facility for a few weeks, until the Bangladeshis, overcome by the compensation package Bokarie provided them—gin and syphilis—failed to submit one too many weekly action reports to mission headquarters in a timely fashion.

Shock and awe were expressed on behalf of the American people at learning that a series of wholesome Christian picnic coolers, once used by orphans for ice cream, had ended up in brothels. And also that a few had been used by street urchins and scavengers to collect broken gin and beer bottles for a priest reported to have been killed by a local warlord in a drunken brawl. This was a place that needed America's prayers and investment. There were rumoured drilling possibilities. Natural resources were a terrible thing to waste.

V.

In time, the boys from town got their mascot to play soccer with them after his shifts. Bokarie proved to be very quick on the ball and had the footwork of a dancer. They delighted that he could knife between them, faking one way and darting the other, and then score with ease. Their fathers gutted and chugged their way around slopitch diamonds with beer coolers for bases. And Bokarie climbed up and over an infamously high retirement-home wall and returned an errant Frisbee one Saturday. He reached summer legend status.

A week after this feat and elevation, Jennifer took Bokarie to tea. He detailed his recent activities. His options for further community involvement were discussed and he was also given an overview of parliamentary democracy and campaign cycles. A soccer workshop was announced after their meeting, to be held in conjunction with a Little Caitlin Bottle Drive. Jennifer decided that it was still too early, too traumatic, for a full creek cleanup. Better to wait until the coming election date was set and then count back from there. Recycling would be a fit response to the tragedy.

The day was a great success and Jennifer took many pictures of the pink-shirted Bokarie bouncing soccer balls on his knees as he deked and danced the children around the pylons, shouting instructions and adjusting postures. Every child was given a set of pink wristbands for bringing a bottle. Parents wore proud seamed faces and inquired about personal soccer tutorials and cursed themselves for forgetting to charge video camera batteries. Cream soda was served. The town was starting to froth and overflow with its recent excitements. First that little girl, so tragically gone, and now this twisting, this turning, this chocolate-skinned newcomer. Dropped in from nowhere and kicking around town as if he's always been here. A few of the old-timers even conceded that road apples could make for good fertilizer.

4

LICORICE WHIPS

I.

As instructed, Bokarie raised his hands to the ceiling and waited. Despite prior explanations of what this would entail, he was still a little nervous. He didn't like any of it, especially this strange man asking questions and measuring him up. He had been told that this was the necessary procedure. Searching hands closing in on his body. Professional interest in his height and habits. The outlay of cash. There were other suited men standing immediately outside the room where he was getting measured up. They were watching him and his escort, smiling with force, waiting to be of assistance. He wondered if he had been tricked in being taken here upon first arriving in the capital city, whether he had been made into someone else's turtle.

The surrounding music, muffled and martial, was interrupted by a loud voice charged up with gunpoint enthusiasm. As if, Bokarie thought with private knowledge, the speaker was using prepared notes not his own, and the words had to be delivered with impeccable vigour of voice or its owner would be made to suffer. Even the man writing information about Bokarie on a notepad paused and looked up at the interruption, though he must have been accustomed to such occurrences.